Painting a Santon

Supplies

Preparing the piece

1. Dust it

   Brush it off, then blow. Dust trapped under paint never comes off.

2. Sand lightly

   400-grit paper on smooth surfaces: face, hands. Not on the drapery, where the texture is part of the effect.

3. Prime it?

   Not on terra-cotta. The warm clay color is a great base, and letting it show through at the edges is exactly what brings a santon to life. On gray or white air-dry clay, a very thin coat of ochre warms things up nicely.

4. Work from top to bottom

   Put the piece on a holder instead of holding it. The oils on your fingers keep paint from sticking.

The order of layers

This is the order the workshops use, and there’s a reason for it: each step covers any mess from the one before.

1. Large areas of clothing

   Coat, dress, apron. One color per area, no detail. Two thin coats beat one thick one.

2. Skin tones

   Face, hands, neck, feet.

3. Hair and beard

   After the skin tones, to clean up the hairline.

4. Accessories

   Basket, tool, hat, shoes, belt.

5. Patterns

   Stripes, flowers, borders. Nothing finer than half a millimeter at this scale.

6. Eyes and mouth

   Last, when everything else is dry and your hand is warmed up.

7. The patina

   The final wash that unifies the whole.

Skin tones

Skin tones don’t come out of a tube. You mix them, and a premixed “flesh” color is easy to spot.

A base that works: white + yellow ochre + a touch of cadmium red. Adjust:

• more ochre and a hint of raw sienna for tanned skin;
• raw sienna and burnt umber for darker skin, never black, which grays it;
• a tiny touch of olive green to tone down a skin color that’s too pink.

Then two passes that do everything:

1. The shadows

   A very thin wash of umber in the eye sockets, under the nose, under the lower lip, in the fold of the neck. Blot right away: it should stay only in the hollows.

2. The highlights

   The skin color lightened with white, dry-brushed onto the nose, cheekbones, chin and forehead. Very light.

Add a touch of very thin red to the cheeks, nose and ears for figures out in the cold, which in a nativity is everyone.

The eyes

This is the make-or-break step. On a 7 cm (2¾ in) figure, an eye is less than a millimeter wide, so don’t even try to paint a pupil, an iris and the white.

The three-touch method:

1. The hollow

   Already laid down with the skin tone: a dark wash in the socket.

2. The dot

   A single touch of very dark burnt umber, with the tip of the 000, in each socket. No black: it makes doll’s eyes.

3. The eyelid

   A stroke of slightly darker skin color just above the dot, overlapping it to make it smaller. This last touch is what turns two marbles into a real gaze.

Check two things: same height, same direction. An eye half a millimeter higher than the other shows from three feet away. Paint both eyes back to back without putting the brush down, with your wrist resting on the table.

For the mouth, a thin line a little darker than the skin, never red. A santon with red lips looks like it’s wearing lipstick.

Clothing

Provençal santons are painted in muted colors, toned down with a little of the opposite color or some umber. Blue straight from the tube is too bright for 19th-century work clothes.

Three rules:

• Two main colors per santon, three at most. Any more and the figure looks gaudy and gets lost in the crowd.
• Shade the folds with the clothing color mixed with its opposite, watered way down, in the hollows of the fabric. Then add a lighter highlight on the raised edges.
• One exception: keep Mary in her traditional blue and white. It’s how people recognize her.

Do patterns (stripes on an apron, flowers on a scarf) with the 000 brush once everything is completely dry, and always follow the folds. A pattern painted straight across the fabric flattens it.

The final patina

A freshly painted santon looks too clean and too sharp. A final wash pulls it together and ages it twenty years in two minutes.

Brush raw umber, diluted 1 to 15 with water, over the whole piece, then blot it right away from the raised areas. It stays in the folds, the hollows and under the edges, just like dust and years of handling would. It’s the same idea as the scenery’s patina, only much lighter.

As for varnish: skip it unless you need it. A matte finish is traditional, and under a nativity’s soft lighting a satin finish creates a shiny spot that flattens the details. If kids will handle the piece, use a matte spray varnish: a very light mist, from 12 inches away, outdoors.

Mistakes

• Pure black. In the eyes, the shadows or the hair. Use burnt umber or a very dark blue instead.
• Colors straight from the tube. Tone everything down, no exceptions.
• Paint that’s too thick. It covers up the details the santon maker spent hours on. Always use two thin coats.
• Shine. Make sure your acrylic is truly matte. Many are actually satin.
• Bad lighting. Skin tones mixed under a warm bulb look greenish in daylight. Paint under neutral light, then check the result under your nativity’s lighting.
• Not knowing when to stop. That one last touch “to make it better” is almost always the one that ruins it. Put the brush down and look again tomorrow.